Conference Loot

The Romance Writers of America's twelfth annual national conference is over.  I'm going to write up and post my notes from the conference over the next couple of weeks, but for a moment let's analyze this excellent pile of loot.

I skipped a couple of the biggest signings to, you know, attend workshops and learn things, so I didn't pick up any free books from Avon or Harlequin.  At the signings I did attend, I tried to be selective about grabbing free books, looking especially for new-to-me authors that I've been curious about.

And, yeah, I snatched up books from a few of my auto-buy favorites as well.

So excited to dig into these. I've got Cecilia Grant's A Lady Awakened queued up for the plane trip home, and Tessa Dare's RITA-winning A Night to Surrender, whose gorgeous prose I cannot praise enough, will be a gift to an aunt who needs a little more HEA in her life right now.

As for The Raven Prince...that one I'm going to put in plastic and hoard. It's an all-time favorite & the signed copy is going to be a look-but-don't-touch item.

Except for Karen Marie Moning and Larissa Ione, both of whom I adore, all of these are new to me authors.

Why do YA books get the best covers? Just look at those. I recently read Remittance Girl's Cover Rage post, and she makes a good point.

A mixed bag of contemporaries - western, erotic, small town - and accidentally mis-sorted a paranormal.  Again, all new to me authors.

These digital download cards that Samhain handed out are such an awesome idea. I really prefer to read on my e-reader, whenever possible, I don't have to put these in a box and ship them anywhere, and, on top of it, they're neat keepsakes that I can slot into my commonplace book.

I also collected an assortment of pens, bookmarks, magnets, along with a great big tote-bag from Harlequin and a smaller one from the Beau Monde.  On my badge you can see a few commemorative pins & lying across it, the reason why gifts of ballpoint pens are particularly useless where I'm concerned - I was taking notes with my Stipula Vedo, an italic-nibbed, piston-filling fountain pen I kept loaded up with J. Herbin's Poussiere de Lune (that's ink, natch) for the conference.

So concludes the photographic portion of my recap.  All in all, I think I came home with about 50 free books.  Not bad, right?

RITA Reader Challenge Review Up @ Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

My review of Stefanie Sloane's The Devil In Disguise just went up at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books:

So here’s a theory for you.  The defining feature of historical romances is this edifice of manners and propriety within which the hero and heroine must find love.  So you can divide historicals into two categories: books whose characters seek to belong, and books whose characters seek to rebel.  Personally, I see the “ton” and its trappings as an obstacle, and I prefer books whose characters feel likewise.  But it’s equally valid to take the reverse view, as Stefanie Sloane does.

Read the rest here.

In the past, when I'm hunting for a good book and my usual sources aren't providing any likely titles, I've googled up lists of RITA nominees and picked from there - and the results have always been great.  The RITA shortlist doesn't include every great book that comes out in a given year, but in my experience the titles that do make the list are worth the time and attention.

SB Sarah explained the Challenge, now in its second year, in a post back in March:

Last year this resulted in a LOT of reviews, but it also made the award ceremony a lot of fun because by the end, there was more than a passing familiarity with the different books. I had several email messages from people saying they appreciated all the RITA reviews because it not only gave them great ideas for what to read next, but it made them more attentive to the awards ceremony as the winners were announced.

And it's true that with twelve categories, it's unlikely very many of us will be familiar with each one.  I was excited to participate and think it will really pay off this year in Anaheim (it'll be my first time attending the RWA National conference).

And thanks again to Ms. Sloane, who sought me out and donated a copy of the book.  It was a classy move.  And thanks to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, for coming up with such an awesome idea and then making it happen.

Bad boys.

I've been thinking, as I often do, about bad boys.  I've read a few books in the recent past (I won't name them) that feature heroes of the type that generally make me swoon - the kind who are just shy of being villains.  They're my favorites.  But these unnamed books didn't work for me, and while it would have easy to blame the heroes for having leaned a little too far toward "villain" and not enough toward "hero," I came to a different conclusion. I think it was the heroines.

It takes a certain sort of heroine to make a really dubious, morally ambiguous hero appealing.  A heroine who's not up to the challenge makes everyone look bad.

Think about it from another point of view.  You know how sometimes you read a romance and end up thinking, "Man, any woman would be lucky to end up with this man - he is a keeper."  I'm trying to think of a good example; maybe William Doyle in Joanna Bourne's The Forbidden Rose?  He's just so solid and trustworthy and reliable and good.  James in Judith Ivory's Sleeping Beauty?  Harry Dresden?

You run across them in books and in life, too - good men who are just programmed, somehow, to do right by women.  They're like the Type O-negative universal donor, one-size-fits-all hero.   No matter who you pair them up with, they're awesome.

Bad boys are the exact opposite.  They're more like the AB+, last size left on the sale rack because nobody fits it hero.  Pretty much by definition, they have a history of treating women horribly.  And we know (we do know this, right?) that it's not because all those other women were inferior or undeserving.

Bad boys can't just match up with anyone.  They need their one perfect fit.  Is it possible that's why they're so romantic?

One of the reasons why I loved Jennifer Ashley's The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie so much is because while I totally, totally fell for Lord Ian, I also knew that I would have been a horrible match for him.  He needs the heroine, Beth Ackerley, who can put up with him at his worst and bring out his best qualities.

Or Karen Marie Moning's Fever books.  If Barrons and Mac had hooked up at the beginning of the series, it would have been a disaster.  He'd have chewed her up and spat her out.  No romance to speak of.  By the end of the series, however, they're an amazing couple.  It's the transformation from the first books, where I rooted for Mac to keep a distance from Barrons, to the later books, when I was dying for them to hook up, that's amazing.

I think that's as far as I've come with this line of argument.  The next step would be to start generalizing about the heroines, but I'm not sure if that's possible - if the idea is that bad boys require that "one perfect fit", then each heroine would have to defy generalization.  In any case, I don't have any conclusions yet.

Maybe I just watched Red Sonja too many times as a child.

Why did I do that?

I went out for a jog yesterday - you know how it is, so easy to fall off the exercise wagon and so hard to climb back on.  I've got a little route that I've set for myself along a little country lane and I keep occupied by marveling at the glories of the countryside (flowers along the side of the road, birds, deer that frolic in circles around my mailbox before gallivanting off across the fields) and paranoid about sunburn and ticks.  I am really afraid of sunburn and ticks. Because I am so afraid of ticks, I always run my fastest when I get to the short stretch of road with trees to one side, and I sort of obsessively pat at my back and shoulders, places I can't see where a tick might be hiding.

Anyhow, so I'm jogging along and I notice a spider on my shoulder.  I think it was a wolf spider, about the size of a dime.  Because I am such an old pro at country living, I immediately shrieked and swiped the thing off of me and then started hopping around in circles in a panic.

But then I was done with the panic and ready to move on.  And I should have.  But the spider was still there, sitting on the road.  Not moving, waiting for me to go away.  Innocent little spider, didn't hurt me at all.

And I stomped on it.  Out of spite, I guess?  I don't know.  But I've been thinking about it ever since.  Why did I kill that spider?  It was a horrible thing to do.  It was mean and senseless.  No, it's not a huge deal, but I regret it.

The Dog Brothel

I just finished Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.  Not as entertaining as some other disease books that I've read, but rabies is fascinating and Rabid contains some pretty crazy anecdotes. One of them is period appropriate and so crazy I had to share.  Namely, that in the mid-nineteenth century many people believed that sexual frustration caused canine rabies.  As Wasik explains:

"Dog owners confronted with the masculine fervor to mount during walks, or with the recurring frenzy of feminine heat, could be forgiven for later imagining that it was these unconsummated passions (and not the unseen nip from a stray in the streets) that caused their pets to be seized by canine madness."

One doctor, Henry William Dewhurst, a man of "murky scientific standing" (which does make me suspect this particular delusion couldn't have been too widespread), backed up his wackadoo theory in 1830 by observing that when sexual urges are "unable to be gratified, as was intended by the great Author of nature, pure madness breaks out."

Which gets around to this basic truth, which most people recognize but bears repetition: the Victorians were as sex-obsessed as anyone else.  What we think of as Victorian prudery is a manifestation of that obsession, a symptom of it -- not a separate beast at all.  You've got to have sex on the brain to put a skirt around a piano leg.

Anyway, Wasik goes on to describe an 1845 Italian screed that provides a nice anthropomorphic distillation of every single Victorian sexual hangup you can imagine.  Based on the assumption that rabies is a form of canine blueballs, "Monsignor Storti" suggested that:

"Each male dog would be brought to a central location [as Wasik clarifies elsewhere, "mandatory canine bordellos"] for his urges to be satisfied.  Immediately afterward, he would be neutered and then sold.  And then -- presumably in order to keep these dogs from generating rabies eventually -- all male dogs would then be destroyed after two years."

Where are the female dogs?  Killed as puppies or relegated to these dog brothels?  And doesn't this sound like a blurb for a YA dystopian novel?  Victorian newspapers must be full of plots for YA dystopian novels.

I don't think anyone ever tried to execute this horrible idea.  Small mercies, right?